The latest report, filed in December, includes data from the 2023-24 school year. It shows that the nation鈥檚 largest teachers union had 2,839,808 total members, including educators, student teachers, retirees, NEA staff and other miscellaneous categories. That’s down from 2,857,703 the year before.

The number of working members 鈥� such as active teachers and support staff 鈥� was 2,471,782, a decline of 12,558. This drop was similar to the decline seen from 2022 to 2023, but there was a more significant decrease of 40,107 working members at the end of the 2021-22 school year. The union had lost 82,000 working members the year before that.

These declining numbers follow a relatively stable membership count. A decade ago, the union had 2.6 million working members and peaked at 2.63 million in 2018. 

This trend is reflected in individual categories. Active professionals 鈥� which include employees like teachers, counselors and librarians 鈥� hovered around 2.1 million from 2014 to 2020. In 2021, the number of professional members dropped to 2.06 million, and then to 2.02 million in 2024. 

Active support staff 鈥� employees such as bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers 鈥� fluctuated between 450,000 and 467,000 from 2014 to 2020. In 2021, support staff membership dropped to 435,507 before plummeting to 415,142 in 2023. Numbers shifted slightly to 415,992 in 2024.

Recent years have been rocky for the NEA and its members, from COVID-19 wreaking havoc on student learning and teaching environments to a strike last year that saw the organization lock out its own staff employees over contract disagreements. 

Union membership has also declined across the country since 2018, since the Supreme Court’s ruling made collecting fees from 鈥渘onconsenting鈥� public sector employees unconstitutional.

Even with shrinking membership, the NEA鈥檚 dues income has increased over the years. In 2024, the organization received the most dues it had collected in at least a decade 鈥� $381.4 million, up from $374.2 million in 2023. 

NEA President Becky Pringle鈥檚 compensation in salary and taxable allowances increased to $449,305 in 2024 from $435,342 in 2023.

But at least in a relative sense, the past five years have not been to CTA鈥檚 liking. It spent $20 million in 2020 in a failed attempt to raise property taxes, and the Supreme Court鈥檚 Janus ruling in June 2018, which banned the collection of agency fees from non-members, has had a damaging effect, but not quite in the way most observers expected.

By the union鈥檚 own calculation, only about 2,700 teachers dropped their membership in the five years since Janus. That鈥檚 hardly debilitating to a union of almost 300,000 members. The hopes of Janus supporters and the fears of union supporters that Janus would lead to wholesale resignations did not come to pass in California.

However, it appears the ruling has been harmful to union recruiting of new members. According to internal union documents, in 2019 there were only 18,000 local public education employees who were eligible for CTA membership but did not join. As of the end of September 2023, the number of non-members had ballooned to almost 36,000.

Overall, the union ended the 2022-23 school year with 38,000 fewer members than it had when it began the first post-Janus school year in 2018-19. This chart, from internal CTA documents, shows the membership trends over the past 12 years.

CTA鈥檚 dues aren鈥檛 tied to membership levels, but to average teacher salary. Federal COVID relief money boosted that significantly, to the point where the union鈥檚 draft budget for 2024-25, obtained exclusively by Union Report, calls for a $30 dues increase. That would bring state level dues to $816. Coupled with national dues, every teacher belonging to CTA will pay at least $1,020 next year. Local dues will add to that figure.

The union estimates the increase will net it an additional $8 million, of which $3.3 million is earmarked for staff pay increases. Another $3.5 million is designated as 鈥渆xcess income over expenses,鈥� which in another context would be called 鈥減rofit.鈥�

Overall, CTA is budgeting for $228 million, which is almost $40 million more than the national American Federation of Teachers received in dues this year.

The California union has several pots in which to place its income, many having to do with politics. CTA currently has $3.2 million in its candidate political action committee, $4.7 million in its independent expenditure committee, $8.4 million in its media fund, $15.3 million in its advocacy fund, and a whopping $38.9 million in its ballot initiative fund.

It is too early to list everywhere the union鈥檚 ballot measure spending might go, but it is already planning opposition to the . Scheduled for the November 2024 ballot, the measure would require majority voter approval for any tax increase passed by the legislature.

CTA鈥檚 financial involvement in local school board races is underreported. The state union recently pledged $100,000 to help elect Telly Tse and Neda Farid Faroumand to school board seats in the Glendale Unified School District, where CTA has roughly 1,300 members. Tse, coincidentally, .

The union also contributed $55,000 to in the Orange Unified School District.

There is no prospect for significantly diminishing the union鈥檚 role in state politics, though it appears CTA will maintain its position through ever-increasing funds collected from ever-decreasing membership levels. America鈥檚 industrial unions have survived decades with such a model. CTA may be on the wrong side of the slope, but the slope is shallow enough to ensure its continued influence for many years to come.

Mike Antonucci鈥檚 Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

But those membership losses didn鈥檛 have a commensurate effect on the unions鈥� bottom line. On the contrary, the National Education Association and its state affiliates experienced significant boosts to revenue during the shutdown year.

The combined income of NEA and its state unions reached almost $1.75 billion in 2020-21, an increase of $49 million (2.9%) from the previous year. Almost all union revenue is exempt from income and capital gains taxes.

This financial information is derived from the unions鈥� annual disclosure reports for the Internal Revenue Service, detailing their income and expenditures. These are public records, but delays in reporting and availability mean a long wait before it is possible to gather comprehensive data from unions in all 50 states.

NEA national headquarters collected almost $397 million in revenue. Its richest affiliates were California ($222 million), New York ($167 million) and New Jersey ($153 million).

These large-membership states are self-sufficient, but many affiliates require national subsidies to pay the costs of union offices’ professional staff. Nine state affiliates received more than 20% of their total revenue directly from NEA. The Mississippi Association of Educators and NEA New Mexico were the most reliant on national funds.

Union employees are the primary beneficiaries of the bigger bankroll. NEA employed 513 staffers in Washington, D.C., of whom 396 earned six-figure salaries. Across the country, more than 2,300 NEA affiliate employees made more than $100,000 in salary.

Member dues supply most income, although periodically some unions receive a cash windfall through other means.

Both the North Carolina Association of Educators and the South Carolina Education Association saw dramatic growth in revenue due to the sale of properties. to a real estate developer for an estimated $20 million, while to the state for a highway widening project.

That union also benefited from $112,624 due to the from the federal government鈥檚 Small Business Administration.

Higher interest rates are a burden, but they did increase the value of the unions鈥� cash investments and greatly aided their financial ledgers in another way: by reducing pension and retiree health care liabilities.

Just like school districts and state governments, unions must be able to cover the future costs of their retired employees. These liabilities can grow to such a significant degree that in 2020, eight NEA state affiliates had a negative net worth. They were a combined $606.5 million in the red.

But the increase in interest rates allowed pension systems everywhere to recompute the discount rate, which is a method of expressing future liabilities in today鈥檚 dollars. Put simply, a higher discount rate means lower pension liabilities.

The change in the discount rate was large enough to push NEA affiliates in Connecticut, Michigan, Nevada and West Virginia into the black. Georgia, Illinois, New York and Washington reduced their liabilities by large amounts but remained in the red.

Any union that can add $49 million to its coffers while losing 70,000 members amid the near-total shutdown of work sites is not one that needs to fear diminished power and influence. NEA is too big to fail.

Mike Antonucci鈥檚 Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

In raw numbers, public-sector unions reaped a benefit from this hiring surge, adding some 83,000 members to their ranks. Though the percentage of government employees who belong to a union fell to a low of 33% in 2022, the new members were certainly a welcome addition.

Unfortunately for the unions, the good news was not widespread. In fact, the growth in membership was entirely due 鈥� and then some 鈥� to one state: California.

The Golden State added more than 250,000 government jobs in 2022, enabling its public employees unions to add more than 111,000 members. Twenty-eight other states added a combined 256,496 public-sector union members. But 21 states and the District of Columbia lost 284,517 members, for a net decline of 28,021 outside of California. New York and Minnesota were the biggest losers.

Each year, Barry Hirsch of Georgia State University and David Macpherson of Trinity University produce this data for their Union Membership and Coverage Database, posting it on their website . Thanks to their work combing through Current Population Survey figures, I was able to create this table, which shows the total number of government employees and public-sector union members for each state in 2022, along with the change from 2021.

Public sector union membership by state, 2022:

Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart.

Examining data for all 50 states and D.C., there is a clear divide between states where unions are growing along with hiring and states where membership losses continue to mount.

This trend should not be surprising. Before the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that public-sector unions could no longer charge non-members an agency fee, growth in the government workforce led almost automatically to growth in union membership. Now, unions must actively recruit each new hire. It stands to reason that unions in some states will do this better than others, and that those efforts will be affected by local conditions.

We can鈥檛 use this data to draw any firm conclusions about teachers unions. When categorized by occupation, the numbers include both public and private schools, plus teachers unions include significant numbers of other types of workers as members. What the data does show is a drop in the number of unionized teachers.

The percentage of elementary and middle school teachers who belonged to a union fell slightly from 46.6% in 2021 to 46.3% in 2022. The percentage for secondary school teachers showed a steeper decline, from 49.6% to 47.1%. The percentage for special education teachers similarly tumbled, from 55.8% to 51.4%.

All this suggests that public employees unions will need even greater levels of hiring just to tread water. When this runs headlong into the loss of COVID relief money and/or a recession, there will be an unprecedented display of labor unrest in government. Brace yourselves.

Mike Antonucci鈥檚 Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

In the last five years, teachers unions have taken a double hit. The first was the Supreme Court鈥檚 Janus ruling in June 2018, which eliminated the practice of charging agency fees to nonmembers. The second was the COVID pandemic that shut down schools in March 2020.

The effects have been detrimental to teachers union membership across the country, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the ranks of the California Teachers Association.

That union’s roster reached its apex at the time of the Janus decision, with more than 326,000 active members working in the state鈥檚 public schools. It has been a slow downward slide ever since.

The first big blow was the loss of 19,000 members when the California Faculty Association seceded from the state union and the National Education Association.

The Janus decision did not lead to the mass exodus of members that its supporters had hoped for and unions had feared. CTA internal documents indicate that only 2,631 school employees have dropped their membership in the last four years.

The union hoped to mitigate further losses by successfully lobbying for legislation that requires school districts to allow unions to make a 30-minute membership pitch during new teacher orientations. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of this measure. In the last 10 months, school districts have hired 3,700 more employees who are eligible to join, but the union has 1,727 fewer members.

Just as the union was coming to terms with the post-Janus world, COVID hit and schools shut down. The union once again won relief from the California legislature, as districts were forbidden to lay off teachers until July 2020.

Nonetheless, membership continued to dwindle to the present day. At the beginning of March 2020, the union had 304,509 members. Internal documents show that figure dropped to 293,444 as of Jan. 13, 2023, a loss of 11,065 members.

Comprehensive numbers for the union鈥檚 995 local affiliates are of less recent vintage, but official as of Aug. 31, 2022. I have constructed a table based on those statistics, culled from internal union documents. I included the comparable membership figures for Aug. 31, 2019, and Aug. 31, 2018. The figure for United Teachers Los Angeles is a best estimate, due to the difficulty of reconciling the numbers of members affiliated with NEA and those affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers Local 1021.

Losses appear to be indiscriminate across all local sizes. Eight of the state union鈥檚 10 largest locals lost members between 2019 and 2022, while overall, 587 locals lost members during that period.

The cure for the union’s ills, once again, lies with the state legislature. The union will work to ensure funding is made available for as much hiring as possible, so membership will grow even if the percentage of new teachers who join isn鈥檛 what it used to be.

The health of the California Teachers Association and other large state affiliates is critical to the overall health of the National Education Association. Their membership dues help subsidize the continued existence of sickly state affiliates in the South. If California losses continue, it will have a domino effect across the country.

Just 6% of private-sector workers belonged to a union, along with 33% of public-sector workers, both down from 2021. Even local government employees, a category that includes most public school teachers, fell to a record low of 38.8%.

While those numbers have declined almost unabated for more than a generation, unions are doing their level best to convince the public otherwise, and are having some success doing so.

鈥淲ith the resurgence of union organizing and unprecedented federal investment in job creation, the labor movement is poised to grow significantly in the coming years,鈥� after the bureau’s report was released.

The touted a report by the union-financed Economic Policy Institute that claimed 鈥�.”

Where did the institute get that number? It took a of 3,915 self-selected respondents, 48% of whom said they would join a union if they could. From this, the institute , 鈥淲hile 2017 is the most recent year the survey of nonunion workers was conducted, we presume that the share of nonunion workers who would like to unionize was at least 48% in 2022, if not higher. Assuming that to be true, that means that more than 60 million workers in 2022 wanted to join a union, but couldn鈥檛.鈥�

You know what happens when you assume.

Last Labor Day, unions also lauded a Gallup poll showing that 71% of Americans approved of unions. They conveniently ignored the additional finding that 58% of America鈥檚 nonunion workers were .

Despite the bad news, unions have been able to sell a resurgence narrative for . Just a few weeks prior to the release of the bureau’s report, , , and all ran stories touting a union comeback. posted a piece doing so even after the numbers came out.

Let鈥檚 add some context to the current situation for unions.

• The overall picture is probably worse for unions than the statistics indicate, since they exclude the 16.5 million self-employed American workers. I cannot find even estimates of what their unionization rate might be, even though I鈥檓 one of them. But I would be astonished if it is an appreciable number.
  
• The number of union members working in the private sector in 2022 was roughly the same as it was in 2011. During a period in which the U.S. economy added 15.6 million workers, unions added zero members.
  
• Even if unions were able to recruit every single worker of the top 10 U.S. employers 鈥� that is, every employee of Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, FedEx, Target, Kroger, UPS, Starbucks, Berkshire Hathaway and UnitedHealth Group 鈥� it would get them to only 10.2% of the private sector, which is where they were in 1996.

The public sector is what has kept the labor movement alive. Its membership rates were remarkably steady until about 2014. Now, government unions are following the trajectory of their private counterparts, and only massive political intervention will rescue them from the same fate.

Mike Antonucci鈥檚 Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.